Ice, without the drink

Le Poire

I added a pinch of salt to the ice cubes before pouring vodka over it, Grey Goose Le Poire, or maybe some other kind with lemon juice.

Now only the half melted ice cubes are left in the glass. The ice takes the shape and essence of melting snow, like what there was on the side of my driveway this afternoon, not as dirty and disgusting but has the same sunken and defeated shape with rugged and amorphous edges and surface.

The snow from the roof continues to melt, dripping into the gutter spout... melting snow and ice is a sorry sight, even when you cannot see it. even a mental picture of the melting snow hurts. no longer the swirling flakes racing the wuthering gust of a storm, no longer the pristine sheet of oblivion that muffles the universe. But it's the same thing, defeated by entropy and heat. Defeated is not the right word, as if some sort of heroic effort was expanded in an attempt to reverse the inevitable, that despite the failure still deserves remembrance and celebration. Whacked, suffocated, rendered irrelevant, an expired option... there, that's more like it.

The smell of oak barrels and aging Tennessee whiskey mixed with fallen and dry leaves, but it only exists in memory, an illusion, as real as it is distant.

Or Duval, Chimay, Westmalle, Leffe, the perfect mixture of a college town and beer brewery, quaint insistence in a little old town full of youthful radiance.

All right...